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<TITLE>Re: [iDC] Strategic usage of folksonomies: a case study</TITLE>
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<FONT FACE="Arial"><SPAN STYLE='font-size:12.0px'>Hi Eugenio<BR>
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My understanding of language, even culture, is that like a Turing machine it is endlessly recombining itself into new patterns. In this sense the term encoding is particular. I would suggest the reason there is a resemblance between a Turing machine and language is that computing is linguistic – it is a way of making language and, like language, it tends to have a life of its own. That is the argument I put forward in the paper I refered you to (referencing Winograd).<BR>
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Coming from a background influenced by semiotics I find the concept of Construction Grammar, at first sight, both alien and intriguing. However, semiotics concerns itself with the unit of meaning, which might be a word but could also be a larger composite structure, such as a sequence of words within a grammatic structure. In that sense there might be no fundamental conflict between the approaches. Construction Grammar might even offer a bridge between those with a semiotic approach and those employing a formal grammar approach (Chomskian).<BR>
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A central premise of pluriliteracy is that people are becoming polyglot not just with spoken/written languages but also other linguistic forms, such as those associated with a mediated world and that for each individual the function of each language they employ can have very different value. So one language might be the one through which they socially interact, another through which they exchange goods and yet another the means by which they navigate power and governance. Garcia does not argue that these value relations are necessarily heirarchic (although they might be) and he points out that such value is motile. We see this evidenced on the streets of our big cities and in the geo-political collisions that typify our age. In this respect pluriliteracy is a useful concept for approaching the more general idea of globalisation and can even be seen as linked to some aspects of post-modern relativism (eg: Foucault’s argument that power, and its use/abuse, is exercised by us all – established as primarily a linguistic activity).<BR>
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Regards<BR>
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Simon<BR>
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On 9/1/09 21:19, "Eugenio Tisselli" <cubo23@yahoo.com> wrote:<BR>
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</SPAN></FONT><BLOCKQUOTE><FONT FACE="Arial"><SPAN STYLE='font-size:12.0px'>Hi Simon,<BR>
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Thank you for sharing your essay "Transculturation, transliteracy and generative poetics", it's truly inspiring. I am not very well-versed in discourses such as transculturation or pluriliteracy; however my research on folksonomies and the emergence of shared lexicons could be related to some ideas in your text. You wrote:<BR>
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"Meaning, and the value that derives from it, has been encoded in diverse forms and media for millennia."<BR>
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I like your use of the term "encoding", since I believe that meaning is not hard-coded into these forms and media, but it's actually being re-coded continuously through social interaction. Indeed, objects are carriers of meaning, but it may be quite different for people who nevertheless share them. <BR>
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In language, the separation of form and meaning is represented by the relatively recent Construction Grammar, a linguistic theory in which a grammatical construction is always a pairing of form and content (<a href="http://www.constructiongrammar.org).">http://www.constructiongrammar.org).</a> More recently, Fluid Construction Grammar has acknowledged the emergent and constantly-changing nature of these pairings (<a href="http://emergent-languages.org/).">http://emergent-languages.org/)</a> These theoretical frameworks are quite useful when studying folksonomies and emergent semantics on the World Wide Web... <BR>
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Surely, a folksonomy is a linguistic model that reflects the degree to which the users who generated it (through their individual naming actions) share a common lexicon. But the meaning(s) of each tag will probably vary greatly for each individual. I'm not sure how this could relate to the concepts of pluriliteracy and transliteracy, but certainly we face a dynamic situation in which the users of a folksonomy must necessarily acknowledge and manage the multiple, co-generated meanings of the same tag. This is the case of search engines, especially tag-based ones: users must interpret and go through results that may be wildly diverse, yet all of them "accurate". Moreover, these results will change over time, depending greatly on the users' online naming acts.<BR>
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Best,<BR>
Eugenio.<BR>
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Simon Biggs<BR>
Research Professor<BR>
<FONT COLOR="#FE7700">edinburgh college of art<BR>
</FONT>s.biggs@<FONT COLOR="#FE7700">eca</FONT>.ac.uk<BR>
www.<FONT COLOR="#FE7700">eca</FONT>.ac.uk<BR>
www.<FONT COLOR="#FD7600">eca</FONT>.ac.uk/circle/<BR>
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simon@littlepig.org.uk<BR>
www.littlepig.org.uk<BR>
AIM/Skype: simonbiggsuk<BR>
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